Tag: Novellas

A Shattering of Glass – Deck Matthews

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THE PAST IS A FRAGILE THING

For Shade, returning to Taralius is like a homecoming she never wanted. She soon finds that old relationships are changed and past contacts have turned sour. Worse yet, a bitter enemy stalks the streets—a venomous assassin who’s sworn to deliver Shade to her own sending.

Meanwhile, others in the city are delving into their own pasts. While Second Corporal Avendor Tarcoth re-establishes contacts from the shadowy life he thought he’d left behind, Tiberius follows the trail of an unexpected message toward an equally unexpected encounter. Neither man is aware of the dangers that stalk them.

Far across the Realm, the man calling himself Carvesh Tarne leads a small company through the depths of Jadenwood in search of answers surrounding the shadowbeasts that nearly destroyed his home and family. But answers aren’t always what they seem. Sometimes they fight back. Continue reading “A Shattering of Glass – Deck Matthews” →

The Killing Light – Myke Cole

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Heloise and her allies are marching on the Imperial Capital. The villagers, the Kipti, and the Red Lords are united only in their loyalty to Heloise, though dissenting voices are many and they are loud.

The unstable alliance faces internal conflicts and external strife, yet they’re united in their common goal. But when the first of the devils start pouring through a rent in the veil between worlds, Heloise must strike a bargain with an unlikely ally, or doom her people to death and her world to ruin. Continue reading “The Killing Light – Myke Cole” →

A Pilgrimage of Swords – Anthony Ryan

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It is two hundred years since the deity known as the Absolved went mad and destroyed the Kingdom of Alnachim, transforming it into the Execration, a blasted wasteland filled with nameless terrors. For decades, desperate souls have made pilgrimage to the centre of this cursed land to seek the Mad God’s favour, their fate always unknown. 

Now a veteran warrior known only as Pilgrim, armed with a fabled blade inhabited by the soul of a taunting demon, must join with six others to make the last journey to the heart of the Execration. Allied with a youthful priest, a beast-charmer, a duplicitous scholar, an effete actor and two exiled lovers, Pilgrim must survive madness, malevolent spirits, unnatural monsters and the ever-present risk of treachery, all so that the Mad God might hear his prayer and, perhaps, grant redemption. But can sins such as his ever be forgiven? Continue reading “A Pilgrimage of Swords – Anthony Ryan” →

Dust of the Darkness – Deck Matthews

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Fleeing the ruins of his broken life, Caleb Rusk arrives in the sleepy village of Timberford. But when a series of brutal and vicious attacks stir the community into a terrified frenzy, Caleb and his friends must join with his bond-brother, Carvesh Tarne, a Cinderborn healer and a reclusive trapper to defend the village from the swarm of shadowbeasts that threatens to destroy them.

In the city of Taralius, a high ranking abbot is butchered in the heart of his cathedral. With evidence pointing to the involvement of the notorious assassins known as the White Glove, Second Corporal Avendor Tarcoth finds himself faced with the spectres of a past he thought he’d left behind. Meanwhile, the blind old sage, Tiberius Alaran, tracks down a lead that could help explain why Hearthborn are suddenly burning out in the city—all while trying to protect secrets of his own

But unbeknownst to either Avendor or Tiberius, a new player is sent to join the game—and her’s is a kiss of death. Continue reading “Dust of the Darkness – Deck Matthews” →

The Gallows Black – Sam Sykes

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To the city of Last Word, one of the last freeholds in a land rent asunder by magic, Sal the Cacophony comes with gun, a blade, and a burning need for revenge.

But when the gallows threatens to deny her the satisfaction of the kill, Sal the Cacophony decides to free her query—it’s the principle of the thing. And in doing so, she sparks a war that will shake the city’s fragile peace to its core.

To escape with her life and her kill, she’ll have to save a criminal-turned-companion: a Freemaker, versed in the forbidden arts of magic and machinery. But the weight of their secrets may be too heavy to let them escape in one piece. Continue reading “The Gallows Black – Sam Sykes” →

Strange Weather – Joe Hill

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A collection of four chilling novels, ingeniously wrought gems of terror from the brilliantly imaginative, Joe Hill

Snapshot is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by “The Phoenician,” a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap.

A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump. . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero’s island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in Aloft.

On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails—splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. Rain explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the country and around the world.

In Loaded, a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning.  Continue reading “Strange Weather – Joe Hill” →

Longer – Michael Blumlein

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Gunjita and Cav are in orbit.

R&D scientists for pharmaceutical giant Gleem Galactic, they are wealthy enough to participate in rejuvenation: rebooting themselves from old age to jump their bodies back to their twenties. You get two chances. There can never be a third.

After Gunjita has juved for the second and final time and Cav has not, questions of life, death, morality, and test their relationship. Up among the stars, the research possibilities are infinite and first contact is possible, but their marriage may not survive the challenge. Continue reading “Longer – Michael Blumlein” →

The Undefeated – Una McCormack

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She was a warrior of words.

As a journalist she exposed corruption across the Interstellar Commonwealth, shifting public opinion and destroying careers in the process.

Long-since retired, she travels back to the planet of her childhood, partly through a sense of nostalgia, partly to avoid running from humanity’s newest―and self-created―enemy, the jenjer.

Because the enemy is coming, and nothing can stand in its way. Continue reading “The Undefeated – Una McCormack” →

Ragged Alice – Gareth L. Powell

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Orphaned at an early age, DCI Holly Craig grew up in the small Welsh coastal town of Pontyrhudd. As soon as she was old enough, she ran away to London and joined the police. Now, fifteen years later, she’s back in her old hometown to investigate what seems at first to be a simple hit-and-run, but which soon escalates into something far deadlier and unexpectedly personal―something that will take all of her peculiar talents to solve. Continue reading “Ragged Alice – Gareth L. Powell” →

Perihelion Summer – Greg Egan

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Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.

Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh water, and decide to sit out the encounter off-shore. As Taraxippus draws nearer, new observations throw the original predictions for its trajectory into doubt, and by the time it leaves the solar system, the conditions of life across the globe will be changed forever. Continue reading “Perihelion Summer – Greg Egan” →